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America's Top Colleges

The best years of life are also among the most expensive. Choose with care.

Our annual ranking of the 650 best undergraduate institutions focuses on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt. Unlike other lists, we pointedly ignore ephemeral measures such as school “reputation” and ill-conceived metrics that reward wasteful spending. We try and evaluate the college purchase as a consumer would: Is it worth spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars for this degree? The rankings are prepared exclusively for Forbes by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a Washington, D.C. think tank founded by Ohio University economist Richard Vedder.

For the second year in a row, Williams College, a small, western-Massachusetts liberal arts school, has been named as the best undergraduate institution in America. With total annual costs adding up to nearly $55,000, a Williams education is certainly not cheap, but the 2,000 undergraduates here have among the highest four-year graduation rates in the country, win loads of prestigious national awards like Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, and are often rewarded with high-paying careers.

In second place? Princeton University, which boasts nearly nonexistent student debt rates due to one of the most generous financial aid programs in the nation. Outside of Princeton and Harvard (#6), Ivy League schools fare relatively poorly, suggesting that their reputations might be a bit overblown. Yale (#14), Brown (#21) and Dartmouth (#30) crack the top 5%, but the other Ivies – Columbia (#42), Cornell (#51) University of Pennsylvania (#52) — do not.

Because of our emphasis on financial prudence, the zero-cost military service academies rank highly. West Point, which topped the list two years ago, ranks third this time, thanks to outstanding teaching (#3) and high alumni salaries (#8), while the Air Force Academy (#10) and the Naval Academy (#17) glide easily into the top 20. Even the less prestigious academies – the Coast Guard (#97) and the Merchant Marine (#158) — score well.

The rankings are based on five general categories: Post Graduate success (30%), which evaluates alumni pay and prominence, Student Satisfaction (27.5%), which includes professor evaluations and freshman to sophomore year retention rates, Debt (17.5%), which penalizes schools for high student debt loads and default rates, Four Year Graduation Rate (17.5%) and Competitive Awards (7.5%), which rewards schools whose students win prestigious scholarships and fellowships like the Rhodes, the Marshall and the Fulbright. The complete methodology is available below and in .pdf format here.

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Still, it does seem to indirectly harm the school’s reputation (through no fault of your own). Then again, someone looking into a degree in engineering would probably search “top engineering schools” rather than the more vague “top colleges” and would probably not base their decision on rankings alone.

The “evidence” that the Princeton University admission process is not “need blind” is in the Princeton University admission application process. Go ahead — fill out all the forms — and you’ll find that Princeton requests student/family financial information during the admissions process, not just for student aid. And even if Princeton didn’t ask how much your family could contribute to your college education — it’s pretty easy to find out what income bracket an applicant falls into by what schools they attended, what sports/extracurricular activities they played — you can even check out their parent’s house on Google Earth.

Poor research with reflects on the entire report. The Coast Guard Academy is in New London not Norwich. Secondly the Academy is like the other service academies free to attend with the cadets being paid 1/2 the base pay of an ensign to attend.

This year we did not rank the Missouri Institute of Science and Technology because of a change in the institution’s Carnegie Classification. It is now a special focus institution, a classification we do not rank.

This measures the most capitalistic and superficial outcomes of education. So schools that have large undergraduate programs in social welfare, education, nursing, and anything artistic are going to be penalized? By all means, let’s not encourage anyone to pursue those occupations. When I am sick I want to be attended to by someone who went to business school, crashed a bank, took a bailout, but made it into the Who’s Who. Those are the same people I want teaching my kids or in charge of child protective services. There is so much more to this world than meaningless financial outcome measures because so much of what makes some of your poorly ranked schools “great” is that they cater to more than greed. What your survey assumes is that anyone making less than $100,000 could not possibly satisfied with their education. It also penalizes any school that encourages students double major, or pursue dual degrees, or submatriculate into a graduate program, because if they are not done in 4 years, well they must be slackers and so is the school. Lastly, I could never respect any survey that includes Rate My Professor! Seriously, a scale that includes not only “course easiness” but how “hot” the professor is? Really Forbes and friends you can do better than that. Maybe we should include Forbes writers in the hotness scale and see how long that metric is used!

If you are going to go into nursing, it doesn’t really pay to go to a college that costs $55k per year, does it? I know a BMW is a better performance vehicle than my Ford Focus, but I don’t drive much, so that would be a foolish investment.

Very few students take an extra year of college to pursue a double major. That would be a very poor investment of time and money. You are much better off getting an advanced degree. Schools that encourage students to take five years and get two undergraduate degrees should be penalized in any objective system.

Moreso, students take five years to complete school because red tape prevents them from registering for the appropriate courses for a four year track, or because schools lack a proper system of academic advisors to get them on track. In terms of lost income and extra tuition, that can put a relatively inexpensive state school on par with Williams in terms of opportunity costs.

As well, if schools are directing their students into niche majors (Peace Studies comes to mind) they are limiting opportunities for employment down the road, especially in the brutally competitive non-profit sector.

Your point about rate my professor is valid as it pertains to “easiness”. As I mention above, though, this adversely impacts tech schools, not schools with fine arts departments.

I do think salary compared to other similar majors would be a useful criterion.